


Somewhere in the darkness, us together for a while

by fortunehasgivenup



Category: Good Girls (TV)
Genre: Blood, Canon Compliant, Death, F/M, Feelings, Magic, Post-Finale, Resurrection, Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-12
Updated: 2019-07-12
Packaged: 2020-06-26 23:50:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,608
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19779031
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fortunehasgivenup/pseuds/fortunehasgivenup
Summary: The dead don’t always stay that way.Beth brings Rio back from the dead. It’s an adjustment, sharing your life with someone else.





	Somewhere in the darkness, us together for a while

Sometimes the dead don’t stay that way.

That’s what Beth’s grandmother told her once when she was a little girl. 

Beth had been young. Annie hadn’t come along yet. Mom and Dad were still together. And when Mom dropped her off so that she could “just have some time alone, Beth,” Gran told Beth stories.

“There was a story in my village,” Gran usually began. Everything happened to a friend of a friend or an acquaintance or a cousin three times removed. 

This particular story went like this.

In the village (back in the old country) there was a young man and a young woman. They are in love, as they always are in these tales. But if war complicates love, civil war shreds it. The young woman kills her young man when he is part of a raid on the farm where she is staying. She does not know that it is him until he cries out in pain. 

He dies the night that the war ends, choking on his blood as the young woman cries and cries and cries.

They take the man’s body to lie with the others until they can dig the graves. It will take days to dig that many.

The young woman goes to the field where all of the dead wait and she finds her young man.

A crone comes along, but pauses to ask her why she cries. The young woman explains that she has killed the man that she loves and the crone laughs.

“Would you bring him back?” The crone asks when the young woman grows angry. She says yes. “You will be joined forever, tethered to one another. Never able to go far from each other’s sides. You will be two halves of a single whole.”

Anything, the young woman says.

So the crone gives the young woman a knife and she says, “Cut in three places - over your heart, the palm of the hand that you use in your work, and your forehead. Gather the blood on your fingers and paint it on his lips. Then, ask him to come back to you.”

It sounds like madness, but grief is madness.

The young woman does it and the young man wakes up with a gasp. They cling to one another, making excuses to others in the village. He must not really have been dead, everyone tells one another, sure that they are lying, but unwilling to consider the truth.

The crone’s words make sense after a while, when the young man tries to go to the market in another town and the further he gets, the sicker he feels. At home, the young woman feels the same sickness.

When she burns her hand one day, her pain is his. They have no children - nothing can be born of a single life, there must be two. But they are happy until the day that they die and are buried together in the earth that they loved so much.

Gran had shown Beth a small knife, a dagger really. “This is that knife, Elizaveta,” Gran had told her. “The young woman was a cousin and she told me this story when she was becoming an old woman, passed it to me. I was there when they buried the two of them. It’s yours now.” 

Then she had warned Beth not to tell her mother. Beth had promised. Hadn’t even told Annie or Ruby. Or Dean, when they moved in together and he found it among her things.

“Family heirloom,” she told him.

She’s mostly forgotten about it - the story, the knife - until a day comes for her to remember.

Rio can’t have been dead - and he’s dead, she just knows it without having seen it - for more than an hour when she digs the knife out of the place she’d hidden it in the back of the closet.

She looks at it. It doesn’t appear special in any way. It’s just a knife. Probably just a story her grandmother told to amuse the two of them. But as she closes her hand around the handle, she already knows what she’s going to do with it.

It takes her barely any time at all to find where Rio was taken and security at the hospital is surprisingly lax. Beth doesn’t think about it as she goes into the cold depths of the building, searching for bodies. One body in particular.

She finds him and it nearly ends her, seeing him like that, lifeless and dull. _What have I done_ , she thinks.

Beth forces herself to stay upright as she makes three cuts with the dagger. Over her heart. The palm of her dominant hand. Her forehead. Gathering the blood that wells up, she smears it on Rio’s lips and bends down until her lips are near his ear.

“Come back, please. It was madness to ever think that I could do this alone and I’ve spent so long accepting that I will always have to be on my own that I couldn’t see you. I couldn’t. I deserve no forgiveness from you,” she says, “but you deserve life. Let me give you that, at least. Please come back.”

At first, nothing happens. He’s just a cold body waiting for an autopsy so that the police can figure out who shot him. _Have they removed the bullets yet_ , she wonders as she strokes his forehead. In her mind’s eye, she can see the little smirk he seems to so often have when he deals with her.

The first bullet popping out of his chest and clattering against the metal slab he’s lying on is the first clue that something’s happening. Beth barely has a chance to see what it is before the pain drops her to her knees.

She stifles her scream in her arm, conscious that there are others in the building who will be less understanding of whatever she’s doing. She sobs, clutching at the place on her chest that she _knows_ is the same spot the first bullet hit Rio.

The second ping of the bullet coming out is her warning for the second wave of agony.

It whites out her vision, renders her immobile. She doesn’t think that she could scream, even if she wanted to. Beth doesn’t think that more pain is possible, but the third bullet proves her wrong.

But slowly, she comes back to herself, hyperventilating on the floor of a storage room for bodies.

“What the fuck?”

Beth lifts her head and finds Rio’s brown eyes staring down at her because they’re open and he’s lifted his head from the slab. He’s a little wan, but as she takes him in, she sees that the open wounds on his chest have closed, turned to neat little scars.

She sobs again, unable to speak.

‘What the fuck, Elizabeth?” He asks again, voice growing a little bit stronger as he pushes himself up into a seated position. His hands go to his chest, feeling over the bullet holes.

“What did you do to me?” Rio demands.

Beth catches her breath. “Magic. I brought you back from the dead.”

He stares at her, incredulous.

To make a point, Beth pricks her finger on the knife that somehow hasn’t slipped from her hand in all the agony. Rio hisses and lifts that same finger to his lips.

“It goes both ways,” she tells him. “Just in case you’re thinking about payback.”

Suspicious, Rio reaches out and pinches Beth. Hard. He yelps, letting go of her.

“We should go,” Beth says, pulling herself upright. She’s shaky as a newborn deer and Rio isn’t much better, but there’s a pair of clean scrubs for him to wear and by the time she brings them to him and he gets them on, they’re a bit steadier.

They walk to her car and get in. Beth can’t bring herself to start the car and drive yet, has a feeling she’d undo her hard work by sending them into a cement support or something.

“You -“ Rio’s looking at his hands, turning them over to inspect himself. “You shot me.”

“Yes,” she says, setting her forehead against the cool glass of the window in hopes that it will help her come back to her body. “Three times. Turner sent me away before you died.”

He nods. “I remember. He told me -“ he frowns, his brows pinching together as he hunts for the memory. “He told me that he’d call an ambulance if I agreed to help him, but it was too late. You’d nicked my lung.” He sets his hand over the spot he means. “Then I was on that table and you were there. How long has it -“

“Two and a half hours,” Beth tells him.

“Will that have an effect on me?” He asks. “Lack of oxygen to the brain and all that?” He looks at Beth like she’s supposed to know. “Am I gonna start craving human flesh?

“I don’t -“ her voice falters. “I’ve never brought anyone back from the dead before. But I don’t think so.”

He stares at her for a long moment, unblinking. Then he throws back his head and laughs.

She takes him to a warehouse and he sends her away with instructions to return the next day. Beth has no idea if he wants to kill her or hurt her or what, but they’re connected now. Whatever he does to her will rebound back onto him. He must know that.

But he’s always had a habit of doing the unexpected, so she’s not entirely sure that he wouldn’t go through with some kind of punishment even knowing that he would feel it, just so that she would too.

——————————

Rio is fascinated by their connection after Beth tells him the story.

“I killed you,” Beth tells him, the first morning that he’s alive again and he shows up in her kitchen. She’s just waiting for him to do something, anything. There are plenty of ways to hurt someone without damaging their body and Beth is pretty sure that Rio knows plenty of them.

He shrugs. “You brought me back.”

He wants to test their limits right away, taking Beth for a drive, then leaving her at a truck stop as he drives until the two of them feel as though their very bones are burning. They discover that 65 miles is comfortable, then the aches begin. Pain kicks in around the 73 mile mark. 80 is excruciating.

When he gets back to Beth, they’re both ashen.

They cling to one another in the parking lot and Beth can feel him shaking. She is too.

“Don’t do that again,” she begs him. “Please, please don’t.” She’s soaking his t-shirt with tears. He is silent and Beth has the oddest feeling that she’s crying for both of them, like he can’t. Or maybe he just won’t.

He cups the back of her head and holds it against his chest. She knows that he will. He’ll want to test how long they can stay just below the pain threshold. Can they learn to be further apart? He’s a child picking at a scab to see what happens, but all that she can think is that the scab is the only thing keeping him alive. Keeping her alive too now.

And she’s right. He wants to know if a shared pain has different degrees depending on physical proximity or distance. It does not. A pinprick hurts like a pinprick whether they’re holding hands or 60 miles apart.

One day, she drops a bowl on her foot and yelps, doubling over at the sudden loss of breath. She takes a moment to sit and gets a message from Rio.

_What happened?_

She responds, then shoves her phone away to rub her temples.

Another night, she comes awake at a sharp pain in her leg. She’s rubbing the spot when her phone lights up with a new text.

_Walked into the kitchen table. Go back to bed._

She tries and finally nods off around dawn.

One morning when she wakes up, it’s to a burn in her belly and her hips moving in search of friction. Despite the lack of stimuli, Beth feels pleasure building steadily and it takes her a moment to put it together.

It’s Rio’s. She’s experiencing his pleasure.

The thought gives her a thrill just as he does something particularly nice that makes Beth’s toes curl. There’s something missing though, so she works her hand down into her pajama bottoms and rubs her clit harshly until she comes. He peaks not long after, sending reverberations through Beth that make her squirm.

_Did you feel that?_

Rather than replying by text, Beth calls him. He answers right away, but says nothing, just pants softly into the phone.

“I did,” she says.

He chuckles. “Good,” he says, then hangs up.

When they see one another a few days later, neither of them make any reference to the experience.

—————————

When Annie and Ruby ask what happened with Rio, Beth doesn’t know how to answer. Does she admit that she killed him, only to bring him back? They’ll have her committed. So she shrugs and tells them that they’ve dealt with their drama.

Ruby doesn’t believe her and Annie gives her odd looks when she thinks Beth isn’t looking.

As for herself, Beth quickly realizes that she’s begun to uncoil every time Rio’s around. He enters a room and it’s like a weight has been lifted.

He doesn’t comment on it, but he notices.

————

Rio and Beth don’t mean to encounter Turner, but one day a month or so after she brings him back, they’re walking past a diner and Rio spots him, drags her in with him to sit in the booth.

Turner looks like he’s seen a ghost. “You died,” he whispers.

“Sometimes,” Rio says, “the dead don’t stay that way.”

Turner’s eyes dart between Rio and Beth. “I don’t -“

Beth offers him a satisfied smile.

“This isn’t possible,” Turner says, clearly spooked.

“What isn’t, special agent?” Rio asks, setting his arm around the back of the booth so that his hand dangles onto Beth’s shoulder.

She does her best not to tense up at the surprise touch and leans into Rio. Let Turner think that they pulled one over on him. That they set it up somehow. He’ll spend ages trying to figure it out.

“You died,” Turner repeats. “You took three bullets, your lung collapsed, and your heart stopped.”

Rio chuckles, shifting his arm so that it’s draped around Beth’s shoulders. “Did I?”

The waitress comes over, but Rio gives her a wide smile. “Oh, we’re not staying,” he tells the woman. “Just saw a friend and thought we’d say hello.”

She laughs and nods, asks Turner if he wants more coffee.

“We’ll leave you to your work,” Rio tells Turner, sliding out of the booth and holding out his hand to help Beth get out as well. They leave him there, staring after them in confusion and shock.

—————————

It’s after the Turner meeting that Rio fucks her again for the first time.

He says nothing as he drives them back to her house, not until she moves towards her bedroom and he makes a sound like a hiss and grabs her hand.

Instead, he takes her to the couch, a place they’ve never been together, somewhere without painful history.

His preparation is perfunctory, just a single finger testing her. She’s wet, has been since they sat across from Turner, but it isn’t comfortable when he practically shoves his entire length inside of her in one go. The ache feels good, feels _right_.

As they pant against one another’s mouths, it strikes Beth that they’re sharing breath the same way they share a life now. The thought makes her sigh.

When Beth rakes her nails down his back, she feels the same lines on her own.

When she orgasms, Rio feels it in his belly.

“Like a hundred little deaths,” he tells her after. “Is that how it feels for you every time?”

Beth, who had felt Rio’s climax as echoes of her own, shrugs. “I think it might be a side effect.”

Rio groans. “It’s a damn good one then.”

He nudges her face upwards so that he can kiss her softly. It might be the first time that he’s been so careful with her, at least since that day in her bedroom when she’d kicked him out.

She pulls away, but presses a kiss to his brow to soften her retreat before laying down at his side. Rio doesn’t say anything, just falls into an easy sleep.

Looking at him, his skin appearing even warmer against the stark white blanket they’d hastily thrown over the couch cushions, Beth thinks about a story.

There’s plenty of ways for the story to be told - Cupid and Psyche, East of the Sun and West of the Moon. They come back to the same key points. Someone gives rules to a woman. Rules that she breaks, just to catch a glimpse of the man that visits her every night. It’s the breaking of the rule that rips him away from her and she must go on a journey to find him.

As a girl, Beth has assumed that the moral was to listen to the rules or else. Now, watching Rio’s chest rise and fall with his even breaths, she wonders if maybe the point might have been that it is the making of the rules that ensures that they will be broken. The game is rigged and it always will be. But the knowing is worth it.

_Perhaps_ , she thinks, _I know myself now._

When she settles against his side, he wraps an arm around her. “Done thinking?” He asks.

“I thought you were asleep,” Beth says, drawing a triangle between the scars she gave him.

He hums, shifting slightly and pulling her closer. “I was. Your thinking woke me up.”

She pokes him in the belly and from there it’s a natural progression for him to tickle her, get her onto her back, the slide back inside of her in search for pleasure.

——————

He experiments with this too, touching himself when he’s at his place, then calling Beth to ask if she came too. One day, when she knows that Rio’s doing some work in his office, Beth reclines in bed and lazily uses her fingers and vibrator to bring herself to orgasm. She ignores the ringing phone the whole time. It’s Rio of course.

When she does pick up, he’s pissed.

“I came in my jeans, Elizabeth,” he hisses.

She giggles.

“This isn’t funny,” he snaps. “What if someone had been here?”

“I don’t know,” she says, running her hands back and forth over her still bare belly. “What would you have done, Rio?”

He hangs up on her, but shows up at her house a couple of hours later to lay her on the desk in the office as he teases her for hours on end. It’s torture for him too - Beth can see how red his cock is - but he won’t budge. Just keeps taking her right to the edge and retreating before she can come.

It’s heaven when he finally thrusts into her, giving her what she needs to come. He finishes inside of her with a low grunt. She feels his cum inside her as his cock twitches, as his hips rock back and forth gently.

He rubs his fingers in it afterwards, when he pulls out, then offers it to Beth to lick from his fingers.

As the weeks wear on and they come together again and again, Rio holds himself at a distance. He won’t go into the bedroom, which seems fair, and says that the loft isn’t his anymore, which is probably true. He doesn’t tell her where he lives though and Beth doesn’t push him.

———————

One evening, Beth is washing dishes when she drops to the ground, clutching her shoulder and she just _knows_. The pain is overwhelming, but she manages to get her phone and pull up the number Rio had given her for when she couldn’t get ahold of him.

“What?” It’s Demon. Beth knows that he doesn’t care for her. After all, he’s seen the video of her shooting Rio three times, even if he doesn’t quite understand it.

“Something’s wrong with Rio,” she gasps.

“You ain’t with him,” Demon grunts.

Beth has to grit her teeth against a wave of pain. “He’s been hurt. You have to go to him.”

She knows that he’s going to argue, so she heads him off. “You have to. I’ll explain how I know later, but if you don’t go, he’ll die.”

That might be a lie, but it’s one that Beth is willing to make to get Demon to just go.

He’s quiet for a moment. “Alright,” he says. Then hangs up.

It’s a few hours before one of Rio’s boys pulls up to the house and demands that she get in the car. She doesn’t argue. The pain is still there, but it’s dull now.

Her escort is young, probably no older than twenty-five, and he keeps eyeing Beth whenever they stop.

Eventually, they pull up to yet another nondescript warehouse and Demon’s opening the door, yanking her out.

“How’d you know?” He growls.

Despite her position, Beth relaxes. “He’s stable.”

“Yes.”

“Let me see him,” Beth demands.

“Not until you explain how the fuck you knew,” he says.

Beth lifts her chin. “I’ll do that when you let go of me.”

Rio wakes up a little while after she’s explained everything to Demon.

“Is it true?” Demon asks as soon as Rio is upright. “She brought you back from the dead?”

Rio shifts his gaze to Beth. “Yeah,” he says, “she did.”

It’ll take some time for Demon to adjust. He has no idea what to do with this information - that someone could be dead and then not. Beth had needed to answer almost every single one of his questions with “I don’t know!” Because she doesn’t. Why would she? This is new for her too.

Demon glares at Beth. “So you killed him.”

Rio’s laughter is dry, a little rough. “That’s what you’re gonna focus on?”

“Shut up,” Demon mutters. “You didn’t feel the need to share any of this with me?”

“Nah,” Rio shrugs, pulling uncomfortably at his wound. Their wound. “It’s need to know.”

Beth retreats to let them argue whether or not Demon needed to know about any of it.

The young driver is outside, smoking.

“Can you drive me home?” Beth asks.

He shakes his head. “Not ’til I get the okay.”

Beth sighs because it’ll be a while before Demon is willing to leave Rio alone. She hops up onto the low wall and pulls out her phone to text Annie about maybe doing dinner the next week.

“You let her bring her phone?” Demon announces his presence with a question.

The driver looks sheepish and maybe a little like he’s about to take it away from her.

“Can I go home now?” Beth asks.

Demon shakes his head. “Boss wants you with him. Bring the car to the back.”

Beth shouldn’t be surprised that Rio’s standing on his own when they get to the back of the warehouse, because the man is an idiot with too much machismo, but there he is, leaning casually against the door. His movements are stiff, but he gets into the backseat with her by himself. Demon sits in the passenger seat, twitching like he wants to help.

“Where are we going?” Beth asks.

No one answers. At least she knows that they’re not planning to kill her. It’s a comfort, however small. Beth wants to laugh at how ridiculous her life has become, but she doesn’t think that the others will appreciate it. Least of all Demon.

The house that they drive to is a little out of the way, cozy.

She, Demon, and Rio all get out, but Demon doesn’t come inside when Rio opens the door.

“What is this place?” Beth looks around.

Rio walks to the kitchen. “It’s my house.”

Beth stands up a little straighter. “Why’d you bring me here?”

He goes to the fridge and gets himself a jug of water. Beth rushes to his side and tries to take it for him, but he growls and she has to let him carry it even though she can feel his pain worsening.

“Why’d you bring me here?” She asks him again after he pours himself a glass and drains it.

Finally he looks her in the eye, but what she sees there doesn’t make a shred of sense, not even when he kisses her.

When he pulls away, he stays close, his lips just inches away from hers. He looks so beautiful in the early morning sunlight that’s coming into the kitchen that Beth can’t even understand it.

“I love you.” His voice is wrecked, rough with exhaustion and worry and everything that he’s been carrying around with him.

Beth shakes her head.

He jerks back, staring down at her. “No?‘

“You can’t love me,” she says.

Rio’s brows pull together.

“What if this is just the magic?” Beth asks. “What if I’ve made you love me?”

Rio laughs. "Then how do you explain how I felt before?”

Beth is confused. “You said I was work.”

“You kicked me out of your bed and told me you never wanted to see me again,” he replies, which is a fair point. “I lied.”

“Why?”

“Why lie? I just told you,” he replies.

“Why do you love me?” Beth can’t make it work with her idea of him, no matter how she rotates the pieces. Rio is distant. He is supposed to be a mystery, one that stays at a distance, part of her life but separate. He is capable of violence and cruelty that Beth is beginning to learn she is capable of as well. He loves his son, she has never once doubted that, but Marcus is a part of him. An extension of him.

He brushes his thumb over her lip. “We don’t always get to know the why and the how of things, Elizabeth. Ain’t nobody ever teach you that?”

The expression in his eyes is so earnest, too earnest. Beth goes up onto her toes to kiss him. 

When he leads her to his bedroom, she feels suddenly shy. They make love for the first time, because that’s what it is when Rio’s pressing into her slowly, kissing her deeply, caressing her like she’s priceless.

As she lies tucked into his side while their sweat cools, she sets her hand over his heart and spans out her fingers so that some part of her is touching each of the scars that she gave him.

Beth can’t find the words to say it back to him, not as boldly as he had, so she calls up the words that her grandmother used to say whenever Beth got picked up by her mother, never looking any better for her time alone.

“Jako te volim.”

_I love you so much._

Rio doesn’t know what it means, but he must have an idea. He bends his neck so that he can press their lips together in a lingering kiss, setting his hand over top of hers. His heartbeat is strong and steady, the evidence of his life anchoring Beth to the moment. To the feeling.

Sometimes, the dead don’t stay that way and for that, Elizabeth is grateful.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Tamino’s Habibi (which gives me serious Brio vibes, I highly recommend his stuff). Thanks to medievalraven and neveroffanon for beta-ing and thanks to everyone for reading!
> 
> Beth is speaking Croatian at the end.


End file.
